dear you,
It’s National Poetry Month, and I’ve been teaching, guest lecturing, speaking, and poeming all over the country (from my kitchen table, natch). It’s an incredible joy. It’s a humbling enterprise. It’s a big job.
It’s largess, in fact, is due to the fact that, in the last year, I’ve re-centered my poetry pedagogy to champion the beginner. The non-poet. Since writing Via Negativa (which dives wholly into the cultural hatred of poetry/the ecstatic/how our language of the divine is similar to our language of ars poetica/desire), I’ve been investing myself in deconstructing why it is that poetry has been marketed as so fucking esoteric. Like it’s something one is either born good at, or not.
In my conversations with scientists, engineers, truck drivers, housewives, therapists, servers, tech folks, and all manner of people outside the scope of poetry’s academic hallowed halls, I’ve found a recurrent theme: imposter syndrome.
You’ve got it, I’ve got it, everyone’s got it.
So, for the next few weeks of National Poetry Month, I’m going to be focusing on all of us Imposter Monsters, starting with an essay on the subject that ended up in McSweeney’s in 2019.
I love you, joy is coming.
xo,
July
On Imposter Syndrome
I’m on tour for a new collection and I feel like an imposter. Trailer Trash, which is a collection of poems about my trailer park childhood, feels embarrassingly academic on the road.
At readings, I preach the rights of poverty and class narratives to take up space. Not only is it possible for archives of the disenfranchised to be captured through art, I say, but also absolutely necessary. Some facts:
The consumption of poetry spikes during times of political duress.
Poets are often the first executed during uprisings.
In marginalized communities where histories have been erased, we have seen emergences of coding patterns, wherein work is ‘coded’ so it survives.
Poetry utilizes craft techniques that allow it to exist outside of police-able states: fragmentation, intertextuality, braided narrative, and telling things slant.
Poetry has no industry, and lives in academia. Poetry doesn’t pay, except in accolades. Work by marginalized communities is written off as navel gazing—these same communities are often expected to write for free. To ask to be taken seriously, or to be paid, is begging, lazy, inappropriate.
Being inappropriate is part of this concept of inauthenticity, contributing to the idea of imposter syndrome, contributing to this idea that this sort of work is without value.
I don’t believe that. I hold dear narratives that have allowed me to find myself reflected in them, that have externalized my own ideas of identity in both the physical and intellectual landscape of the literary world.
Which begs the question— is this all really about capitalism? How disappointing!
I think a driving force behind feeling like an imposter is that I’ve written about the trials/triumphs of class through poetry—which has a reputation for being standoffish, aloof, academic, inaccessible.
But here I am, on tour! Insisting on poetry’s place at the table of discourse about capitalism and validity. What happened to taking my own word?
That’s what it is, maybe, to be an imposter. To preach one thing and practice another. To live on the thin border of understanding both the preaching and the practicing, and not be able to occupy either.
I keep saying I don’t have any answers for you. Always, I value discourse more than answers, always—but is that enough? Furthermore, what can we say of discourse in communities that want just plain answers? What do we do?
Write, navel gaze. Like it’s your job, because it is.
originally published in McSweeney’s issue 53
Support my work by buying my books, booking an astrology reading with me, or taking the class that this whole series pivots around, Imposter Monster: Poetry for Non-Poets (begins May 3rd, 2021).